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Monday, April 23, 2007

Into the mouth of the beast

I was in my public library today and came across a copy of one of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind books. Being that it was priced at $0.50 I purchased a copy. Given that: the series has sold 50 to 60 million copies in some form or other; that these readers comprise a core constituency of the Republican party and the 30% of the populace that still supports President Bush; and that I consider dominionism to be a corrosive force in American politics, I thought it might be a good idea to read the book to get a better understanding of the movement.

Additionally, I have an uncle that has been sucked into one of these dominionist churches and spends all of his time reading these novels. It's amazing, it's like the more he reads, the less of his brain remains. Hopefully, by reading the book I might be able to communicate with him and possibly bring to his attention some of the discrepancies between the book and reality (not to mention that the Rapture theology of LaHaye is not to be found in the actual Bible.)

Along these lines, I think it's going to be important that secular minded inviduals begin to educate themselves about religious tradtions and especially make efforts to increase their biblical literacy in order to begin communicating with the authoritarians amongst us who are beggining to give up on democracy.

I'm again in a hurry and can not develop my thoughts to the extent I'd like to, but I will link to this postfrom Mrs. Robinson over at Orcinus who covers this topic quite well. The first two parts of that series on authoritarianism are also well worth reading.

If you search through the archives at the Secular Web's library you'll see there is a long-standing tradition of Christian revisionist stories of death bed conversions from various "heathens". Charles Darwin springs to mind, for example.

Even in conversations I've had with Muslim fundamentalists you see the same mentality at work, they are unable to conceive that anyone would deny that Allah is lord. Which is why they make insanity the only permissable defense for apostacy.